Our stakeholders can be anybody. They can be people, individuals, or they can be groups, or they can be institutions, who will be either affected by the project directly or indirectly - it doesn't matter - or have some way that they can influence or affect the project themselves. So it goes in two directions - people who we can affect and people who can affect us.

So stakeholders can help the project run smoothly. They can support us. They can be our champions. They can cooperate or they can hinder us and slow us down. And some very powerful stakeholders can even mobilize to stop the project entirely.

Through stakeholder analysis, we're going to firstly identify who are our stakeholders. Who are the people who can affect our project? And who are the ones that we have to get on our side to make sure things run smoothly. And we will create a stakeholder management plan so that we can manage their interests and expectations. There will be an Excel sheet you can download to work with on some of the exercises a little later.

VIDEO: THE WHAT & WHY OF STAKEHOLDER ANALYSIS

Clearly, managing our stakeholders has got to be a good thing, but let's have a quick look at some of the benefits of that. Let's say you have a really powerful stakeholder, whether they're in government or in business or they have a powerful role in the community, or perhaps they might be somebody who's just an influencer.

They can help us very much. They can help us gain support. And some of these stakeholders may have very important and valuable insights that can help us better understand the situation and help us better design and deliver a project that gets results.

Through stakeholder analysis we look at what we might expect, what we can anticipate, as people's reactions. Will they support us? Will they be worried?

Will they be enthusiastic? And how can we tap into that enthusiasm even more? If they have an interest, how can we make them more interested and more excited about what we do?

And, if they're negative about what we do and they may be planning to resist - what can we do to address their fears and get them onside also? Or at the very least, make sure that they do not interfere or interrupt the project?

Stakeholders, however, do need to understand the benefits of what we are doing if they are to support us. We communicate with them early. We communicate with them from the very beginning. Before we even design the project, we have to take into account the stakeholder interests and how we're going to manage those.

Let's imagine that in this particular case, an NGO has decided to set up an inner city homeless shelter so that people don't have to sleep on the streets.

How would people react to that? Think about the people who live in the neighborhood, people who run businesses, institutions such as the police. What about the media? What about the health care providers? Each stakeholder will have a different perspective on the problem and a different perspective also on the solution.

Stakeholder groups themselves are not homogenous. You may have different opinions within the same group. One neighbor may say "No, we don't want these people around here. That's going to lead to crime and anti-social behavior." And perhaps another neighbor might be saying, "I think it's great that we're doing this here, that our neighborhood is the one that's helping out".

Health care providers may be positive about this. These are some of the hardest people to reach, who may have chronic illnesses, and yet they're homeless. It's very, very hard to get services to them.

Business owners may say it's going to be bad for business. Some may say it's good for business.

The police, they don't know either way. They're neutral at this moment. They're keeping an eye on things. They would need to be closely communicated with and informed.

The local councilor may be thinking, "This is going to make me look good. I could get re-elected if this project goes well." His opponent may be thinking quite the opposite.

And the press, the journalists, they're saying, "Well, that could be a story here." And there probably will be. But what kind of story will there be? Again, the press, too, is a stakeholder in this case. And how they portray the project and what kind of press coverage they give depends on us.